All linked by common thread an interview with Vladimir Vaclavek.

Vladimir Vaclavek is a musician who needs no introduction in the Czech Republic. It is enough just to mention the names of the groups in which he has been involved--Dunaj, E, Rale, Klar, Domaci lekar, Cikori, and VRM and it is clear that we are dealing with one of the key figures in Czech music of the 1980s and 1990. All these groups, like his solo recordings, share a share a common thread--a unique Vaclavek signature recognisable at once to any experienced listener- He is currently giving concerts with his present group VRRM and planning a new CD.

Although V.R.R.M. has only been playing together for a relatively short time, the sound of the band has changed strikingly. Is this the result of your desire for a new sound?

After Rene Parez left we created a new repertoire. The sound grew out of the change in the V.R.R.M. line up, I mean the arrival of Ivan Acher and Marcel Barta. Marcel had worked with us as a guest, and played with us at about eighty percent of our concerts. Ivan and I knew each other, and I knew his musical ideas. Ivan mainly did music for theatre and had never played live anywhere for any length of time.

How did V.R.R.M. come into existence?

For some years I did a lot of travelling and scarcely ever played at home in this country. I had some songs ready and new ideas that had matured in my head. I was keen to put together a new band and that was the reason for V.R.M., where Rene Parez and Milos Dvoracek played at the beginning. And then as I said, the line-up changed to V.R.R.M.

It is also a group where you are doing more with electronics and electronically modified vocals...

I don't listen only to one kind of music and essentially I don't care where music gets to me from. And so with electronic it wasn't planned, but happened thanks to the arrival of Ivan Acher, who loves these things and works with them. I think his singing and Milos's singing complement each other brilliantly, I just add a bit of mumbling if I feel like it.

Can you say how the sound of the band will be developing in the future?

It's hard to say. Certainly it will be a little harder, but we don't have an advance plan of the music, It's better to keep looking and searching, and feel the sense of adventure in it For me music is a matter of searching and I've already managed the first step, which is connecting up to myself.

What is your attitude to improvisation?

At the moment we improvise relatively little, and then mainly at concerts, where as saxophonist and clarinettist Marcel probably has the biggest scope for it, as well as himself coming from the jazz scene and having an affinity for this type of playing. I would be pleased if we played more freely in the future, It's beautiful that it's a thing of the moment when it happens and it doesn't matter if the result is sometimes stupid and embarrassing, because tension when something new is being born is stronger.

Do you improvise on the basis of a previously created structure, a model, or is your improvisation free?

The structure is given beforehand, and we sometimes just draw it out or reduce it. But with Klar we sometimes went on stage not knowing what we would play That was really free improvisation.

I have a feeling you are gravitating to a music in which a repeated structure reveals itself to the listener. Is this your concept of minimalism?

Yes. That's probably true. Obviously I've heard minimalist music, but it's more that I feel what is inside me and gravitate to that Repetition is a certain bridge that allows you to reach a trance state. You connect yourself up to the lower currents of music, things that are outside notes, and radiate the most

Have you been attracted to this from the beginning?

Yes.

What kind of music did you grow up on, folk music?

Not at all. When I was learning to play the guitar, then first of all, of course, it was tramp songs (Czech campfire songs, often based loosely on American Country music). The classic beginning. Then I learned to read music and play electric guitar and I jumped right into big beat. I listened to Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin and similar bands, but I was most influenced by the King Crimson record, Discipline. I only discovered folk music later. When I played with Dunaj, we wanted to hear our roots, and also we were from Moravia It may sound banal but that was how it was. But with E too we wanted to be close to folk music, the south of Moravia. It didn't mean that with Ewe actually quoted folk music. It was more that we felt the connection with it Vladimir Kokolia, Josef Ostransky and I. It was also only later that I realised how strong a feeling I had for eastern poetry as well.

You and Vladimir Kokolia seem to share a love of Eastern cultures.

We've been very much influenced by them. Both of us love koans, for example and haiku poetry.

What fascinates you about it?

It's impossible to talk much about it, but I'll try. People generally think that a koan is a paradoxical sentence, which you think about a great deal in order to grasp its full depth, but I think the koan is something slightly different When you put all your strength into looking at the koan and into the koan, it is like looking into a mirror. It leads us to ourselves, and through it we can see things as they have never yet been seen. The paradox turns out to be only apparent It's the same in life.

And the haiku?

That is a little different from a koan. It is poetry of crystalline precision, but as I have said, the koan leads us to ourselves, The two cannot be compared, even though there is a similarity as a result of the joke that is present in both disciplines. For me it's the same with music, because in music I return to myself. It is not just a question of picking up the guitar and getting notes out, but a process of searching, getting to know yourself, although this doesn't mean that music can't be entertaining. On the contrary, it has to be hugely entertaining.

Tell me about your relationship with poetry? You have set poems by Bohuslav Reynek, Antonin Pridal, and Jan Skacel to music, and you write poetry yourself.

The text is exceedingly important for me. When I'm looking for a text for a song it always takes me a very long time, because there mustn't be any false or wrong element in the relationship between the music and the text. My new album, a song album, will have poems from more than one poet--Antonin Pridal, Garcia Lorca, Bohuslav Reynek and something by me. I don't know what to say about my own poetry, since it's too personal a matter. Generally, a poem is a crystallised inner feeling, an inner understanding. For me poetry is above all something very precise and it even ought to be more precise than science. But that is something it has in common with music. Music too has to be connected to emotion and all forms of perception, and everything has to be in unity and sincere. When there is an imbalance in music, a dishonesty or dishonour to music itself and life, we can always feel it